Unum Corpus, Una Mens
Four centuries ago, to this very day, the first two copies of that rather famous book, the First of Folio of William Shakespeare, were recorded as being sold, both of which were bought by a certain English gentleman known as Edward Dering. Four weeks previously, the large tome that is the First Folio had been enter’d in the Stationer’s Register, but it was Dering’s purchase that seems to be its very first entry into the public domain.
By December 5th, 1623, Shakespeare had been dead for seven & a half years by then, but his words were well on their way to becoming immortal. One could say that the Bard from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the very first & eponymous titular holder of the office which, in the spirit of the Caesars, we should call the Shakespearean. Fundamentally, the office-bearer should, through dramatic poetry, hold a mirror up to Humanity, revealing all aspects of its soul unto itself. In addition, the holder of the Shakespearean office should both regulate, & reinvigorate, the English language.
With this cohesive & singular body of plays I have named the Conchordia Folio, I hope to have become the second ‘Shakespeare’ so to speak, & set a second precedent for future bards & poets. It is not impossible, it is not unique – it is perfectly doable, & if one is willing to work with all one’s powers towards an attainment of the office, one’s Folio will one day be created, as mine was today. It consists of twenty-four plays, eight of which form a fictional contemporary Octology set in Edinburgh & Burnley, call’d Leithology. The other sixteen form a history cycle, two of which are set in ancient times – a Greek & a Roman concord -, with the rest continuing more or less where Shakespeare rested his own history cycle with the christening of Elizabeth I in 1533. I often feel that Shakespeare’s naming of Elizabeth’s mother as Anne Bullen was possibly some kind of prophetic gimmering.
Whatever did transpire in his creative furnace, my next history, Atahualpa ends in the very same year as Elizabeth’s christening, 1533. From there we travel thro’ the France of the Three Musketeers, the Ottoman siege of the Maltese island of Gozo, the Jacobite rebellion, the fall of Napoleon, the birth pangs of the United States of America, the genius of Robert Louis Stevenson, & so on, right up to the rise of the Madchester movement as witness’d by my own childhood.
Perhaps the most important series of conchords is the Gods of the Ring trilogy, which together can be disembedded from the Folio in order to stand alone as the epic poem of the United States of America. It was design’d as such, & as the Russian genius is for novels, the Italian for painting, the German for opera & the British for song, so the American genius is for spectacle, & for me their epic poem should also be experienc’d as theater & film.
Just as it takes Neptune 165 years to orbit the sun, the Conchordia Folio breathes out 165 of my own original songs, to which repository are added a good number of songs from other sources which seem’d well plac’d to accentuate the narratives of my conchords. This, of course, is my personal evolution of the folio genre – a collaboration of the Muses, among whom are the ones which sing. Indeed, at its most primitive, Conchordia means ‘with chords,’ altho’ ‘harmoniousness’ is a direct translation, & the multi-tasking creative duo that form’d ‘The Flight of the Conchords’ also inspir’d the title, which I settl’d upon some inspirational morning among the Indian Himalayas in 2011.
On this day, then, the first phase of the Conchordia Folio is complete, that of its birthing. The second phase shall be its rearing, that is to say what editorial improvements I can effect upon its body during my lifetime. When that ends, the Folio’s third phase of life will begin, when the last & final version will make its way in the world, waiting to inspire the next holder of the Shakespearean Office. To them I say, carry on the history of Britain & then the world from the period I left off, refresh the language as well as you can, & most of all, entertain the people, for it is they who give the bards their stories, & it is they who love to hear them told.
Brodick, Arran
December 5th, 2023
The Conchordia Folio 